The Cannibal Spirit (28 page)

Charley set another tin of water on the fire. He peeled and scraped out the inner bark, and tossed it in the tin as it was coming up to boil. “Take pity on him who lies before us,” he sang to it.

Charley then took another pan from Walewid's side of the fire—asking with a pointed finger first, the chieftain nodding, terse, by return. He set it with water from the stream to boil as well. He tore off the fruit from the chokecherry what he'd gathered, then stripped and broke the stems and threw them all in the can, with the sharp-tooth leaves to follow. They'd have to distill for some hours before we could feed the brew to Harry, but they was the best I knew for easing fevers, and for cleaning out the blood.

I worked slow, trying to keep from slicing the tendons and longer muscles what passed through the shoulder, but I was taking much away that would stop Harry's shoulder working properly again, if he survived. I had already performed some fell surgery that night, just earlier in the darkness of the woods, with my machete. But I held firm and did not dwell on that. There was images what came to me as well from the night of David's funeral, and they was harder still to ignore.

On the other side of the fire, the men of Blunden Harbour had gathered together. They was speaking in high, bragging tones, swigging from the bottles they still had, and hurling words of scorn our way. Walewid alone sat in silence, watching us without expression. I wondered if he had the control over his men we would need, if we was to survive this night.

Eventually, I ceased my knife work. There was now a great gaping hole in Harry's shoulder. Blood welled at its bottom, but I could not see anything else that looked infected.

“Do you have the red peat moss?” says I.

But before he handed it over, Charley whispers to me, “You ain't making the proper performance of it.”

“Be damned with performance,” says I. “Harry's cold and won't remember none of it anyhow.”

“But they,” and he pointed across the fire, “they won't forget none of it. Leastwise not Walewid. Show them you's a proper man of medicine, George.”

“I ain't got the tools what I need for it,” says I. He just shrugged. Well I cursed the old fool, but he was right. So I stripped some of the red cedar and twisted them into a neckring for myself to wear—which was why Charley had brung it out of the forest in the first place, of course.

“Take the damned spruce bark off the fire and cool it,” I tells him. I dredged up my old song what I used to sing when I was performing my healings as a younger man. Then up gets I and walked four times around poor Harry, all the time singing my sacred song. The men had fallen silent now, watching me. I took off the cedar ring from about my neck and ran it up and down Harry's body.

“His clothes have to come off. Burn them with the cedar ring,” Charley whispers to me, like I don't know it. But first, I turned towards the ocean. The moon lit up the water. I could see out across it for miles, the mountains black menaces in the distance. I called out. “Carry away all that is bad, Supernatural One, Long-Life Maker. You Killer Whale Spirit!” I almost thought I might see that killer whale what rose beside me when I first came into the inlet. But the waters were still, and there was no other sound.

I turned back and knelt beside Harry. I took off his boots. Then I cut away his clothing with the skinning knife till he was naked. I bundled those rags together and I pushed the cedar ring around them. Then I stood and faced the fire. The men was all watching me still. “I pull out the sickness and I burn it,” says I. I sang my song and I threw the bundle into the flames. They crackled and flared as they took my gift.

At my feet, Harry looked grey, sunken of chest, and already dead. I knelt by him now. Charley handed me the tin with the spruce bark mulch. I poured off what excess water there was. I pushed my hands into that larger pan of water what was bubbling away on the fire. I rubbed my fingers together in the blistering heat of it, till I reckoned they must be clean of dirt.

I took out the white spruce mulch and layered it down into Harry's wound, spreading it about the edges as well. Then I pressed some of the red peat moss across the top of the wound.

Charley ain't so stupid as he looks. He'd been winding what cedar bark string was left into thin rope. Now we tied it about Harry's shoulder to hold the moss secure upon it.

I stood up and stretched my shoulders.

“That's it?” The man in the yellow shirt was standing in the middle of the other men, pointing a finger at me. “Do we let you live for
that
? Is there
no more to your medicine?” Some of the other men shouted agreement at this. Walewid said nothing.

Charley was beside me then. “Take the sickness round the fire four times, and give it to me after,” he whispers.

I looked down to where the rotten slivers of flesh were sitting, rank, on their cedar leaf. So I took them up and started to singing again. The men was jeering me now, though. But I kept the leaf open on my palms, and paced about the fire. When I passed by them, two of the youngest made little leaps at me, feigning violence and whooping, waving their blades in circles over their heads. I turned towards them. I held up the leaf. “Watch that I don't blow this out upon you,” says I, “making you all feel the sickness. Bringing you all to rotting.” They kept off me then, though they didn't stop from marking me with scornful words. I knew we was at the edge of the razor, and surviving might need more than just the fixing-up of Harry.

I sang and I stepped about the fire four times. Charley was waiting for me at the last. Now he cried out, and his voice was that of the raven. He held up his hands and I slid the leaf onto his open palms. He kept on with his cawing, but now he hopped—like the bird as it moves about on the ground—he hopped across towards the men on the far side of the fire. Some of them laughed, but there was tension in them that I could see as well.

Charley moved until he was no more than a few feet in front of the group of men, with Walewid still sitting, stock-still, nearby. “What sickness is this?” Charley says, shouting out the words. “What sickness is this?” Now he folded his hands so that the leaf curled in half to seal up the rotting flesh inside. He pulled his palms tight together, linking up his fingers.

“What sickness is this?” says he, and he threw his hands out towards the men. They flinched, some of them. But there was nothing there. The leaf was gone.

“It is nothing!” Charley says, leering, his voice a hiss. And, as they took to jabbering, Charley came back round the fire and sat down beside Harry. I dropped my old bones down next to him. He drew out Harry's gaudy
tobacco tin from his pocket and built himself a cigarette. He lit it with a coal from the fire. He blew upon his fingers where he had held the coal.

“Make they heads crazy,” he says, in English, looking at me and twirling a finger round and round by his ear. He chuckled quietly. Then he drew on his cigarette and blew a long, slow stream of smoke into the air.

“BRING ME HEMLOCK BRANCHES
. I will make a ring with them. With that ring I will bring back the soul. I am the life maker. I am the life maker. I am the life maker. I am the life maker.” My face is daubed in red and white paint. Mud is in my hair. I am naked. I use the plants of the forest. I call down the spirit of the cannibal what dwells deep in the wilderness. The Cannibal Spirit. Red smoke rises from his house. His slaves are out gathering corpses for his dinner. His servant, the raven, devours the eyes of his master's victims. The Hoxhok bird lives also with him, tearing out the brains of men with its long beak, and the Cannibal Spirit's grizzly bear, who delights in killing with his bare paws. That is me. Old grizzly in the wilds, great massive paws grappling and tearing.

There ain't no cannibals. Put your slavering white man tongues back inside your craws. Wipe up the drool upon your chins. There ain't no savage men on the coasts above Vancouver, chewing human flesh. There is brutality enough in us already. But I ain't no more tasted human flesh than have you, choking down thin wine and wafers in the cold mausoleums what are the churches of your Christianity.

I can kill a man. Yes. It is easy. But to feast on him after? Maybe it is Christianity itself makes white men so obsessed. Perhaps parts of the bodies of enemies was ritually ate, once upon a time: that fairy tale saying we invoke when it is all too grim to have been just yesterday. The past is a forest impenetrable.

I am here in New York, before this black suit of armour what is the cause of so much, though I have not even reached it in my story yet. I have walked among the glass cases and the objects in this long hall. I knew all I saw, for it was me gathered nearly everything here: these masks of whale and dogfish, sun and seal and wolf, eagle, thunderbird, and bear. The cannibal birds, one with its long beak broken, as it was not when he had sent it off, and but poorly repaired. The great face of the raven, flared
nostrils through which the man who wore it might see. I still can see whose eyes they was did once look through.

There are masks with the faces of shamans, their lids half closed as they discourse with the spirits. There is an old, old mask, one I had known most of my life and even questioned in myself, as I closed up the packing lid, if it should be sent away from its home. It was one of the first I did collect, back when I did still ask myself such things, the grim, stupid, lumbering face of the Dzonokwa. And beside it is the mask of the Qomogwe, its devilfish tentacles wrapped all about its flat whale face.

All of them seen through dusted glass, so that they seem no more than swift-dimming memories, caged here in the great granite architecture of the museum.

I have seen that some is marked with small paper signs naming them, as often wrong as they was right. Many, though, do not have tags at all. How might they be viewed by the few white people I have passed, slowly pacing the halls? I read all the tags. I have gazed in every case and tried to recall the circumstances of their collection.

There is a canoe laid out along the roof of one case. What a struggle it was to pack for shipment. Carved from one solid piece of cedar, fifteen foot long and painted all dainty in red and white and black at its prow. The owner was drunk when I bought it off him, and regretful after. I had to turn quite forceful in seeing the man away.

In one case there has been set up a scene from daily life, using three mannequins, two women and one man, the women squatting, hanging bark that has been already shredded to dry upon frames. The man works the cedar with his hands. I was before the frozen scene for I could not say how long, staring at the waxen, empty faces.

Against the walls are smaller poles and feasting dishes in design of seal and killer whale and bear, five feet long and more, carved from single blocks of cedar, filled once with steaming eulachon grease, or seal blubber, or mounds of sour-cooked fish. There's broad spoons, as wide as hands, by which the people scoop and slop and eat at ceremony. A gravebox, still so beautifully painted in black and red. It was from Rupert itself, built only for the purpose of being sold and shipped off to the East.

There's button blankets. One is hung upon a wall between two high windows. It has a black background and designs of the raven in red and white. I ran my fingers along its bottom edge. It is a blanket my mother made to sell to the museum. My hand rested there on those materials her fingers spent such time upon, the complicated artistry of her own fine fingers as they did weave and sew.

There's rattles the shamans shake above their patients, thick cedar bark neckrings, and all manner of utensils used by the people in their everyday lives—all laid out in the glass cases of the long gallery.

And there is a mound of skulls I took from all those islands of graves I did come upon in my travels up and down the coast. I have plundered the graves. I have shown but little respect for the holiness of such places.

I ain't never before killed a man, though, and I ain't planning to do it again. But the truth of it is that it ain't hard. I look in myself for some terror, guilt, horror at my actions. But there is none. I done what I had to. That's it. I might be the only man I know alive still what has actually taken a head in warfare. Oh, they was famous headhunters in times past, the Kwagiulth. As was many of the tribes up and down the coast. There's skulls aplenty to be found in the gravehouses of the old chieftains. And Boas is a great one for skulls. I've sent him dozens I have unearthed, at two dollars a piece, thank you very much. And I have taken him all around the villages of the people, measuring skulls, both living and dead. There's science attached to it, what asks if some men may be shown to be more primitive than others by the size of their craniums. Boas thinks it bunkum, and wants to show that we all are equal under the sky, and I ain't disagreeing.